88yr Old Mayor Gets City Debt-free & Puts 700M Cash In The Bank. | Hacker News Reader

88yr Old Mayor Gets City Debt-free & Puts 700M Cash In The Bank.

sidburgess.com

99 pointssburgess48 comments

Woah woah woah. I live in Toronto. Mississauga is a suburb. They got out of debt by getting into bed with developers who went wild with unrestricted development. All this wouldn't be out of the norm if the mayor's son wasn't a developer and she had excused herself from meetings involving the city and his company. But she failed to disclose the conflict of interest and her son's company benefited. Mississauga is now a textbook case of traffic gridlock, is starting to experience high violent crime (because all the families that moved their in the 1990s now have teenagers with nothing to do), and it is on track to lose its debt-free status as of 2012.

http://www.mississauga.com/news/article/507414

Hurricane Hazel is definitely a character though. I don't disagree with everything she's done but I've always been particularly skeptical of how she ran the city's books because I figured that it was unsustainable and the population would eventually have to pay. The developers helped build out their infrastructure but now that the development boom has matured there, the tax payers are left having to maintain it. It will cost them and I expect they'll run deficit budgets for much of this decade.

Additionally, being part of the lower class in Mississauga is probably one of the worst places in Canada to do so - public transit is practically non-existent, the city is a gigantic, congested network of ultra-wide boulevards. It is impossible to survive there without a car, thus further depressing the income of working class people.

Mississauga is a textbook example, IMHO, of a city gone wrong. It is the best Canadian example of the nightmarish, identical suburbia. Zero investment in infrastructure, absolutely no effort put into mass transport (despite being one of the most populated areas of Toronto)... of course you're running a surplus.

As compared to Toronto proper - a city with proper, extensive transit coverage, numerous financial woes (like any other city), yet a haven for working class folk.

Putting a full set of electric buses on those streets would still leave a big chunk of that $700mil in the bank.

Mississauga Transit has a current active bus fleet of around 410 buses. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississauga_Transit#Bus_fleet

And if you go there and ride them (I have), you will realize how pathetic 410 buses is for the level of population Mississauga supports. Even arterial routes are often only once per half-hour, once and hour is depressingly common, and service levels are just really, really poor. It's truly one of the worst public transit systems I've ever had the displeasure of using. If I was too poor for a car in Mississauga my life would be terrible indeed.

Thanks for explaining this. I knew there had to be more to it than the author's free-market ideology.

I am a fan of design first. If it is a community failure, than so be it. However, there is certainly something to be said for not passing on debt to your kids. As both an aspiring planner and a father, I appreciate communities that seek to be as neutral as possible with their finances. Peace.

How does a development boom burden tax payers? Were there no business created in the "unrestricted development?" It stands to reason that a healthy business climate generates tax revenue, instead of increasing the taxes of existing tax payers.

rfghjhbg said it best. They did attract a few big businesses. Microsoft Canada has their headquarters (I believe that's what it is) in Mississauga. But they did so with the lure of unsustainably low taxes on these businesses. What's worse is that for the most part, there's not enough work in Mississauga itself to sustain its population. So a huge percentage of its population works in Toronto and surrounding cities.

Fundamentally, Mississauga depends heavily on Toronto for the jobs of its population as the manufacturing businesses it attracted are hurting right now and never could sustain the huge population.

I don't want to make it sound like I'm bashing Mississauga. Toronto created this phenomenon of commuter ghettos by ignoring the living needs of middle class families through most of the 1980s and 1990s. Toronto also let just enough businesses escape to these outer suburbs through high taxes, to make it seem like a feasible option to move out there. So people did, but most of the jobs that a professional who lives in these communities works at are still in Toronto itself.

For the most part the only thing keeping downtown Toronto itself from being a mess is that it's the financial hub for Canada. This sphere of influence is not necessarily permanent though and I worry about this city a lot. Alberta is where a lot of the resources are and it would make sense for the financial sector to be there. We like to poke fun of Albertans because they have all their eggs in the oil basket. But right now Toronto has all its eggs in the banking basket. It's a very fragile proposition.

No - they were mostly just housing suburbs. That brings in income from fees when the houses are built - but you have roads, sewer/water, schools, hospitals to fund forever.

That's fine as long as the people living in those houses are tax-profitable middle class dual income. As soon as they aren't you have just built a 500,000 person slum to fund.

To my understanding, the financial picture of North American cities is essentially driven by public employee salary and benefit costs, which are out of control due to unions.

Whether a city is struggling or not right now, or will struggle in the future, is largely a question of how high they let the payroll and pension benefits drift.

I live in Toronto, and my understanding is that Mississauga's budget surplus is largely due to lot levies paid by property developers. Building a new house means paying around $20k in infrastructure fees (for new roads, sewers, etc.)

Most of the development of Mississauga happened from the 1970s onwards, so they are still in the honeymoon. I've talked to urban planning students about this, and the general consensus seems to be that they are going to be fucked when the time comes to start maintaining and replacing the infrastructure.

It's not quite as bad as some of the urban sprawl in the USA (I've seen Cleveland), but still a textbook example of short-term planning and unsustainable development.

Have you been to Mississauga? It's urban sprawl gone mad. It's one of the most bland, characterless strip mall excuses for a city in North America. The books may be balanced, but it's a joyless wasteland of big box stores and cookie cutter urban development.

If you look at a map at the "proper" scale, you will realize that it is really just a repeated set of streets, truly cookie cutter as you say.

Look at the curved roads which go between major streets - they all curve roughly the same way, and feed into the residential areas on the same pattern.

The first thing they do in any suburban construction in Mississauga is scrape the terrain flat, then add in artful hills and curves as dictated by the blueprints, not as nature had them. The end result is this homogeneous, entirely manufactured landscape.

The roads in Mississauga were designed to handle traffic twenty years in the future. Unfortunately they were built in the 1970s and are now feeling the strain.

It sounds like Emeryville in the Bay Area.

it's a joyless wasteland of big box stores and cookie cutter urban development

Fair enough. But one man's joyless wasteland is another man's cheerful paradise.

There's no accounting for taste. At least, I hope not.

<rant>

What does being 88 years old have to do with anything? The title could've been "White Mayor Gets City Debt-free..." or "Female Mayor Gets City Debt-free..."

One thing that annoys me is that for anyone over 80 years old, the first (and often only) thing that people notice is their age. When I get that old, I want people to see me first and my age second, not the other way around.

</rant>

What does being 88 years old have to do with anything?

It means she grew up during the worldwide Great Depression, but was still old enough to have known its stark contrast to the prosperity of the 1920s. This could have influenced her towards extreme frugality.

She was also an adult before the worldwide adoption of Keynesian fiscal policy, so the idea of even temporarily running an unbalanced budget might be particularly odious to her.

I for one find it encouraging when people that age are achieving something great by anyone's standards, not just the lax standards that society applies to the senescent.

At the very least it makes old age less terrifying.

Your comment just reinforces what he's saying. Substitute "people who are black" for "people that age".

I remember when Morgan Freeman was on 60 Minutes. It was great: http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=1131418n

I'm never going to be black. But someday I hope to be 88, and it's going to be really damn annoying if everyone says "wow, that's pretty good...especially for an 88 year old!"

Not really. Being black doesn't make you slower, less able or more susceptible to disease. Aging does.

>> But someday I hope to be 88, and it's going to be really damn annoying if everyone says "wow, that's pretty good...especially for an 88 year old!"

If you're 88[1], still accomplishing meaningful things and don't have cancer or dementia you're doing brilliantly and shouldn't care what people are saying about you.

[1] Substitute future impressive age assuming life expectancy continues to increase.

Your argument sounds so temptingly plausible, doesn't it? Yet, women inarguably have biological limitations compared to men in some respects, but in those areas where they do, I've found that they still really hate it when you say, "you did a great job...for a girl".

Besides, your claim that specially calling out black excellence is different because of their fundamental equivalence is specious. We know that blacks are underrepresented in many high status areas. Thus, we know that there are barriers of some sort or another blocking them from achievement. It's an incredibly weak argument to say that these barriers aren't worth acknowledging, but the barriers to equal average achievement for older people are.

It's not really relevant whether you think old people are feeble on average. I, as everyone, wants to be judged on my own, as having the full potential of anyone else. When you say, man, you did an amazing job for an old person, you are suggesting that a younger person could do it better, or, at the least, I could have done even better when I was younger. But if some younger person could do it better, why aren't they? It's a little obnoxious.

Celebrating someone for having to "overcome" being black or being old or being a woman lowers their status in each case. This is just a fact.

Perhaps because, on average, people are dead before they turn 88? Or, because people retire at 65 (or 55 in Canada?)? Or, because she's been mayor for over 30 years, which isn't exactly something you can accomplish at a young age? Or because she's in incredibly good shape for a woman of her age?

There exist inappropriate times to comment on someone's age, or to make decisions based on it. This wasn't one of them. The story was much more about her than the debt free nature of the city. I'd also mention that she does not in any way seem offended by such comments, she seems to enjoy playing it up and joking about it.

"I'd also mention that she does not in any way seem offended by such comments."

Yeah, I wonder how I'll feel about this when I'm older. Maybe I won't mind. It just sounds weird to me when people mention the age of someone and it's not relevant to the story, kind of like when someone is telling you a story about someone and they mention that they are black and it's completely irrelevant.

I recall, at the ripe old age of 34, being put off by a new engineer who said "People of your generation look at technology different than us younger people, but it's cool that you are so familiar with the internet."

Now, I recognize that 34 is _little_ out of place at some startups, but I hadn't realized I'd moved into a new generation.

It didn't really bother me, so much as cause me to be aware that time is certainly passing by...

So familiar with the Internet?! Kids today, with their Bings and Googles. We had to use Veronica and Archie, and we liked it! Back then, both our browsers and our hypertext transfer protocols were at version 0.9, if you can believe that!

LOL! These kids are great at friending each other on MySpace and watching videos on Youtube, but people our age built the Internet one metre of fibre at a time. We're the creators, they're just consumers.

...and when we built it, it was uphill both ways. And we liked it that way.

The mayor's age is relevant, because being a mayor at 88 is quite unusual. White mayors or female mayors are to be expected; an 88 year old mayor who has served for 31 years is simply a remarkable part of the story.

Our society has agreed that after 60 years or so, you have earned the right to put your feet up, move to Florida, and retire. I admire that she has an easy out and yet chooses to continue serving the city she loves, and with excellence to boot. Well done, ma'am, I would like to shake your hand.

I like to see articles that emphasize that smart people are old. Ageism is far too prevalent, imo; old people are worthwhile and should be revered, not mocked or denigrated. Oldness is experience, and oldness is an advantage in most cases.

Experience is an advantage as long as it is not squandered by adopting extreme traditionalism. If you can keep learning when others have stopped, you can achieve anything.

Experience for youth is not a fair trade. Experience is usually domain specific and prone to being rendered worthless as times change. Additionally, experience can render you resistant to further learning. Youth brings energy and the ability to learn faster than others.

Lets remember that the article emphasises the mayor's age precisely because 88 year olds achieving great things is so very rare.

I hope that I'm wrong and you're right, but I'd rather have youth than experience any day of the week.

> When I get that old, I want people to see me first and my age second, not the other way around.

Good luck.

Good point. I suppose I just find it encouraging. Point taken though.

Also, nothing personal meant by my comment.

Oh I didn't take it personally at all. I honestly appreciated the reminder to check myself when I reference someone like this.

A few problems with this rosy analysis:

1. Mississauga's vast, low-density road system, built in a non-stop sprawlathon over the past 40 years, is aging and will soon require heavy-duty maintenance costs. Without development charges to pay for this (the city is now built out), the current municipal funding model has a pretty abrupt time limit.

2. Mississauga would not enjoy as high a ratio of commercial to residential property tax revenues as it does were it not nestled right next to Pearson International Airport. So much for the unregulated free market. Given that airport-related development is peaking with global oil production rates, this economic gravy train is about to run dry.

3. Mississauga achieves its positive municipal cash flow by aggressively scrimping on public amenities and infrastructure. Toronto and Hamilton bear most of the regional burden of poverty (and their struggling municipal finances reflect this imbalance), but the lack of public transit in Mississauga will start to put the squeeze on tha 'city' as oil prices become more volatile over the next several years.

In all, Mississauga is heading toward a perfect storm of rising infrastructure costs, falling industrial revenues, and curtailed driving as a replacement for a real urban transportation system.

And is based on having the HQs of global corps there. As soon as another city offers a better tax break those HQs will move in a nano-second.

Look at Ireland when the bank crash hit the US

I just think it is an interesting idea to tie tax levels to the city budget (which is what I assume they mean by "charging what they need"). This would provide incentive for the city to balance the budget, as the cost of any spending programs would be felt by the citizens immediately and not delayed to the future.

I agree. Passing costs on to future generations is common place in other cities. This practice would surely cause elected officials to think twice before building.

Or it results in the run-down no-investment nationalized industries of europe in the 70s.

Look at airports that are owned by the municipality, they have no construction, no investment - because that would look like a deficit. Then look at commercial airports that can borrow money. Or compare AMTRAK to a commercial airline.

Not building new water treatment plants, or new transport links or new hospitals but just spending money patching up the old ones = fiscally responsible zero deficit? Now imagine a corporation whose plans were to spend no money on sales, expansion, R+D etc what would it's share price do?

Imagine a company that generates no revenue and yet spends money improving its infrastructure. What would its stock price look like?

I don't believe that government services are lower quality than private services because of a lack of spending.

Did anyone else read the headline and think that this was the newest Mixergy interview?

Wow. That is one cool mayor. And debt-free, just like North Dakota!

Also interesting: she doesn't campaign for re-election any more. She files the paperwork to be a candidate, and that's it. She refuses to accept any donations (saying instead people should donate to charity), does effectively no campaign events, and gets re-elected with 90%+ each time.

"One of her friends is Hockey Night in Canada commentator Don Cherry, who joked during her 87th birthday that while 98 per cent of the city voted for her, he was looking for the remaining 2 per cent that didn't."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazel_McCallion

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